ARTICLE FOCUS:Rick Gerard explores some methods of simulating a camera lens. In this tutorial, Rick uses the Boris Sphere Plug-In for After Effects.

Creating a fake iris using a 3D sphere plug-in like Boris Sphere or FE Sphere turned out to be a little more difficult than I thought.
The idea is simple, but illustrating a blade turned out to be a bit of a trick. Let's start there.

My first try didn't work out. It looks like this should work. It doesn't.

A little experimenting and I came up with this:

So why is this better? We will get to that later. Now on to the AE project.

Step 1: Creating the blades.

The first step is to create a long thin comp that will become your iris blades. I made mine 700 X 1400 pixels.
Now import in the blade illustration and move it to the far left of the comp so that its anchor point is at x=0 and y equals what ever you need to position the top of the illustration at the top of the comp. It should look like this:

Step 2: Now the fun part... or how I arrived at the shape of the illustration.

Set up another comp at your output resolution. I used 640 X 480. I called it 'Iris Effects'. Now drag the 'Blades' comp into this comp and apply your favorite sphere plug in. I used Boris Sphere. Set up the filter so that you're looking straight down on the sphere. Tumble @ 90°. Set the faces so the image wraps around and so you see only the front.

Here is the setup:

You'll notice that I've also added in the twirl filter with the radius set to 100 and the angle set to 2X + 0°. I couldn't get enough curve to the blade. This solved the problem.

Here's a little trick that will help you figure out what your illustration is doing. Drag the comps apart so you can see what's happening in the Iris comp as you modify the blades comp.

You'll see that you have one nicely curved iris blade in your Iris Effect comp. Move the 'Blade' layer up and down and you can see how this single blade will look. My first illustration was too narrow at the top. When I moved it down in the frame the iris blade took on a strange shape. If you don't like the shape of the blade go back to Illustrator and modify it. It only took three tries to come up with a blade shape that I liked. Just remember that the top edge of the shutter blade will be squished to a point by the sphere filter so you need to keep it fairly straight so you'll avoid having a star shape when the iris opens. Duplicate the blade illustration 10 times. Click on the top one and set its X position to 1400. Now select all and use the Align and Distribute palette to evenly distribute the 9 layers across your comp.

You'll have to move the top copy of the blade to the position 10 to make the blades look right. You should now see a nice closed iris in the Iris Effects comp. Now hit the letter P and set a key frame for each of the blades at 0:00.

Move to the 2 second point in the time line. Animate the Y position of the blades by selecting them all and using the shift and down arrow key. You'll see the effect as you look at the Iris Effect comp. It should look like this.

To add to the effect I also applied a key frame at frame one for the Spin in Boris Sphere of 30° and 0° at 2 seconds. This helped with the illusion.
A little hue and saturation adjustment and some modifications to the lighting settings in Boris sphere and I'm done.

Here's the final result.

-- See also Rick's other method of simulating a camera lens using Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects. You decide which one you like best.

Rick Gerard is a frequent visitor and contributor to the Adobe After Effects COW. Pop in to comment on this article or ask questions. Like to see who Rick is and find other articles that he's contributed? Click here.

Join VFX guru Tobias Gleissenberger for a fun, high-energy look at how to create all sorts of digital noise, glitch, and other disturbing video effects with any version of Adobe After Effects, without using any plug-ins!

In this intermediate tutorial, Mocha Product Manager Martin Brennand takes you through smoothing the horizon in a Samsung Gear 360 shot using the Reorient Module in Mocha VR. Jittery 360 video footage can be made more watchable by stabilizing with Mocha’s planar tracking tools. The tutorial is done via the Adobe After Effects plug-in, but the techniques apply to all versions of Mocha VR.

The April 2017 release of Adobe After Effects (version 14.2) is packed with new features, and Tobias Gleissenberger of Surfaced Studio is here to show you the latest and greatest. Highlights include the Essential Graphics panel and Motion Graphics templates (with Adobe Premiere Pro integration), the addition of Lumetri Scopes and Color Correction effects, new effects organization, the Camera Shake Deblur filter and more.

Learn how to create complex title animations in Adobe After Effects! In my last tutorial I covered how to create, customise and animate simple titles in Adobe Premiere Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xQtq...
In this tutorial we will take things one step further and create titles that are too complex to create with Premiere alone. We will be working with and customising presets, creating character by character animations and we will look at the power of custom Text Animators.
Want to learn more about how to animate text? Check out the Adobe help page:
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects...

Imagineer mocha Pro 5 Plug-in for Adobe brings all the amazing features of the professional version of the mocha Planar Tracker directly into After Effects and Premiere Pro in the form of a plugin. In this in-depth review, After Effects tutorial guru Tobias Gleissenberger of Surfaced Studio will show you what you can do with this new plug-in, and discuss what he likes and doesn't like about the new update.

Learn why you should upgrade to After Effects CC 2015.3 - 13.8.1 - a close and detailed look at the latest release of After Effects (August 2016). Roei Tzoref will be focusing on his favorite features that set this release apart from previous versions: Performance, Queue in AME, Lumetri Color new features, and more.

Some of the coolest stuff you can do inside of Adobe After Effects is only possible once you unlock the power of masks. Join After Effects whiz Tobias Gleissenberger of Surfaced Studio to learn about mask animation and interpolation, using the variable width feathering tool, managing mask modes and ordering, and more.